Re: Variable-width font indentation

[Clément Pit-Claudel]

On 2018-03-06 15:31, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
>> From: Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden>
>> Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2018 14:59:21 -0500
>>
>> * Paul and I have been discussing an language-agnostic heuristic to preserve 
>> alignment when changing from monospace to variable-pitch faces.  This 
>> intends to preserve the original indentation of the code, by inferring what 
>> it would have been if the logic originally used to indent the document had 
>> been aware of variable-pitch faces.
> 
> I don't see a need for such a feature, sorry.  We have indentation
> already; its only problem is that it doesn't work well with variable
> pitch fonts.  That's what we need to try to fix, if we care about the
> capability of displaying program code with such fonts.

I'm thoroughly confused: doesn't the algorithm that Paul proposed, and that I 
show an implementation of, do exactly that?

Do you want to get the indentation code involved because the heuristic isn't 
perfect?
 
>> * You're describing a language-specific way to get a nice-looking 
>> variable-pitch rendering of a document; your way is to reindent the 
>> document, essentially.
> 
> I was describing a way of teaching the existing indentation code
> handle variable-pitch fonts.

Right, which is where we differ: the solution Paul and I have been thinking is 
designed not to rely on exiting indentation facilities. 

In your world, concretely, what happens when I open xdisp.c and press M-x 
variable-pitch-mode? Does everything look misaligned until I M-x indent-region 
the whole file?

What about a file from a different project that uses a different indenting 
convention?

Thanks,
Clément.